Search Results

The understanding of a shared source of creativity among the sane and insane came to the fore with the exhibition and collection of patients’ work in both France and Brazil in the 1940s. The visual evidence of a common creativity was often underwritten by discussions of artistic quality and how the patients’ work looked “futurist” or “surrealist.” This chapter turns to 9 Artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro, an exhibition of the creative work of nine of Dr. Nise da Silveira’s patients. The exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art São Paulo in 1949, one year after the museum’s founding. The chapter examines how the patients’ work became key to the discourse of modernist abstraction and its institutionalization in Brazil, just as it was regularly exhibited in the very spaces of Brazil’s first modern museums. Such circumstances differ notably from French artist Jean Dubuffet’s contemporaneous theorization of art brut, which is also addressed in this chapter.

This chapter recounts the birth of institutional psychotherapy in the hospital of Saint-Alban, in the Lozère region of France, during the Second World War. It begins with the life and work of the Catalan-born psychiatrist François Tosquelles, one of the most important theorizers of institutional psychotherapy. After fighting alongside the POUM during the Spanish Civil War, Tosquelles fled to France and was placed in the refugee camp of Septfonds. This experience of activism in radical politics and of war-time psychiatry shaped his thought and his practice in fundamental ways. He arrived in Saint-Alban in 1940 where he met the cast of characters who all contributed to the development of institutional psychotherapy, including Lucien Bonnafé, Georges Canguilhem, Georges Daumézon, Paul Éluard, and others. Saint-Alban during the war became a center of psychiatric innovation and intellectual effervescence but also of political resistance against Vichy and fascism.

The term outsider artist refers to artists who have no formal education in art and do not belong to the art world. Outsider art is known as art brut in Europe and “raw art” in the U.S. This chapter studies the life and works of the outsider artist Henry Darger. His work often features seven heroines, called “Vivian Girls,” who arm themselves with guns and fight determinedly to liberate child slaves from the control of evil adults. The most striking characteristic of Darger’s paintings is their strange naïveté and self-authorizing innocence. Some reject his work as the product of perversion, while others are riveted by it as a mirror of their own desire.